Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy (10 page)

There wasn’t anything more to say, so we hung up. I thought of my anthropology book
Intro to Tribal Cultures
, feeling numb and
jealous of all the brides captured in tribal wars. At least someone wanted them.

My new friends were so patient with me. They took me out and consoled me, reassuring me that I could do so much better while pointing out cute drunk guys that I should take advantage of on my rebound. One friend, Suzanne, who was particularly sick of my never-ending desperate ramblings, said in her thick Quebecois accent, “Why don’t you go
visite de
Haitian witch doctor, no?”

Finally someone with some decent advice! She gave me the number, and I called to make an appointment with a woman named Natasha. The name threw off my confidence. Instead of conjuring the image of an exotic dark-skinned woman wearing necklaces made of bones, “Natasha” brought to mind the cartoon character from
Rocky and Bullwinkle:
the evil girlfriend with the heavy Russian accent and edgy haircut. Then again, as long as she could cast a spell, her name could be Scamarella, for all I cared.

On a cold, snowy Saturday afternoon, I knocked on the door of a suburban house, worried that I was being had. The house didn’t look much like a witch doctor’s abode, with its light-blue stucco and Hummel figurines peeking out of the window.
There had better be a basement
, I thought as the door opened. I envisioned walking into a room filled with heavy red drapes and low lighting, decked out with occult symbols, snarling taxidermy, and dripping candles. I also imagined that Natasha, despite her name, would at least be dressed like a gypsy. Instead, a very plain-looking woman in her thirties wearing a faded pink T-shirt and a pair of Gap jeans welcomed me in. Between voodoo
appointments, she could have easily worked as a kindergarten teacher. At least she had a slight accent.

Natasha ushered me into a living room filled with shiny faux-mahogany furniture and a velvety green couch covered in plastic. I went to sit down, but she motioned to a small wooden chair instead. I guess I had to earn my spot on the good sofa. It didn’t matter: I was sure I was getting scammed, but my skepticism suddenly morphed into a new, more hopeful idea: She doesn’t need to hide behind mysterious razzle-dazzle because she
is
an authentic Haitian witch doctor. Still, a little extra black eyeliner would have been nice.

She clasped my hands in hers and asked very seriously, “What brings you here?” Talking to a Haitian witch doctor was like a therapy session, the difference being at the end she’d cast a hex! She studied my face as I blathered on about my love for Michael—how we dated and it was fireworks, endured a year apart, suffered a cataclysmic breakup, followed by me chasing him for another six months, and, finally, moving here. I wanted him back. She nodded like she’d heard it all before and said that for forty dollars I had a choice: I could cast a “Move On with Your Life” spell, or a “Come Back to Me” spell. Was she kidding? Without pause I said, “Come Back to Me.”

She kept trying to sway me. “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because there’s a special on the Move On with Your Life spell. I would recommend it for you.” But I was dead set on Come Back to Me. There was no question. That’s why I came.

Natasha gave me two green drugstore-quality candles and told me to mark each one off into seven sections. Every night at sunset for
two weeks, I was to place one candle on his photo and burn a portion while reciting a passage of Haitian text that she’d written out phonetically on a card—much like the transliteration printed in a Passover Haggadah so you can sing along even if you don’t know Hebrew.

I couldn’t wait for sunset! I knew if my roommates caught me burning candles and reciting voodoo chants they would assume I’d made the leap from despair to insanity and raise my rent. I set up a makeshift altar in the depths of my closet, placing the candle on a photo of Michael playing guitar, and every night I entered into the dark arts and quietly performed my return-to-me ritual.

You might wonder if I was so far gone that I really thought this would work. I will say that performing my witchcraft prayer every night gave my life much-needed structure and meaning. It was grasping at straws, ridiculous, maybe a little stupid, but it was all I had. Not only did I think it would work—I was counting on it.

At the end of two weeks, I got out of bed with a huge smile on my face, drank some coffee, and skipped off to class. Every passing minute was part of a countdown to the season premiere of my life. As soon as I got home, I dropped my bag and coat on the floor and ran across the room to the phone. As I dialed, I felt clearheaded and healed.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Michael, it’s Ophira.”

And then it happened. Again.

Sigh. “Hi, Ophira.”

I didn’t hear angels singing or witches cackling; I heard the sound of a sad trombone go
wah wah
, followed by Natasha laughing. Nothing
had changed. He was still dating that flautist, and the only one dumber than her was me for believing that some bullshit candle-burning could make Michael forgive me and fall back in love with me. It’s not like Natasha had offered a money-back guarantee.

“Ophira?” Michael said.

I swallowed hard.

“Yes, Michael?”

“I think you should stop calling me for a while.”

I searched for something to say. This was the opposite of what Natasha said would happen. This was not worth forty dollars. Maybe I didn’t concentrate hard enough or said the wrong words. In a last-ditch attempt to get something out of the call, I said, “Okay, but promise me this: If by the time I’m thirty, we’re both not married, you have to promise to give us another chance. Do you promise?”

It was hard to hear those pathetic words come out of my mouth, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“Okay, Ophira, whatever,” he muttered, and hung up.

Thirty years old seemed ancient to me. I had almost a decade to become the person he’d want back.

I was furious at Haiti and marched to my closet to throw away the remnants of my voodoo crap. I also threw out his photo, but then thought better of it, pulled it out of the trash can, and stuck it in the middle of a random book, hoping to forget which one. I wanted an immediate fix, someone to hold me, so I called Leo but he wasn’t home. Instead, I walked down the street to the bagel store and ate a piping-hot poppy seed on the street, without even once looking up at the useless stars.

A
ccording to my anthropology texts, if you really want to understand another culture, you need to immerse yourself in it, and the surest way to do that is by sleeping with the indigenous population. It’s called “doing fieldwork.”

The textbook didn’t exactly say that, but that was the approach I planned to take.

As I emerged from my smooth-jazz trance, I couldn’t believe I’d almost thrown away my barely-legal years on one guitar-strumming man. I reembraced my original belief system that for women, love and marriage was a stealth attack on our potential to take over the world, and sex was the quickest way to get to know someone.

Combining my own philosophy with anthropological theory, I decided that going forward I’d approach love/romance/relationships
with the detachment of a social scientist. Screw postmodernism; I was a postromantic. No longer would I succumb to the Eurocentric construct of a relationship. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend; I wanted an informant: someone I could sustain three months of a one-night stand with—at least enough time to try on his life, pick up a new skill, and get out before we got attached. It was like fostering rescue dogs. I also bought a black leather motorcycle cap and insisted on wearing it every day. I thought it made me look dangerous—the kind of person you wouldn’t want to fuck with. In my mind, it also distinguished me from that weak, feeble girl who had loved and lost Michael.

I didn’t know where to find “my people” at McGill, so I explored a few subcultures. Naturally I joined the college radio station again, and for the first few months I followed a motley crew of Goths and indie rockers to a variety of punk gigs. At a concert featuring an up-and-coming thrash-metal band, I looked in the graffitied mirror of the dive bar’s filthy bathroom and admitted to my reflection that I hated both the scene and the music. I had filled my mosh-pit quota in life when I dated Tommy. I needed to move forward, not revisit adolescent angst. I kept the radio gig but ditched the scene in search of one that was more novel—at least to me.

McGill, nicknamed Harvard of the North by the students who went there, was the country’s number one college at the time. It was so vastly superior to other Canadian universities that I didn’t have the faintest clue what anyone was talking about in my lectures. While my classmates were engaging in discourse about Immanuel Kant, Michel Foucault, or Edward Said, I was offering up suggestions for lodging in
exotic locales. Apparently, I’d had my nose buried in the equivalent of a bunch of Lonely Planet guides, while they’d spent their first semester reading philosophical treatises.

While zoning out in Anthro 202, unable to follow the professor, I spotted the first target of my flirty fieldwork project: Ryan Peeling. I could tell by the slight upward tilt of his chin that the culture I’d be infiltrating was “the society of old money.” Old Anglo-Saxon money. He probably knew how to sail, golf, and charge a fancy dinner at the club to a house account.

We were definitely from different worlds.

I wanted a window into his lavish world—and not from the servant’s quarters. I wanted to know what a winter tan felt like on my lips, what it was like to sip an aperitif with my bank manager. Although he wore the same Nirvana-inspired plaid button-down as the rest of us, I suspected he was more at ease in a sweater vest with a blue and green Izod tie poking out. As I watched him scribble down whatever the professor was saying, I noticed he was growing out a proper short haircut. I imagined his father was probably worried that his prized heir was going hippie on him. I’m sure the pursuit of an anthropology degree over a practical degree was disappointing enough.

When the next class began, I slid into the empty seat beside him—not that he noticed. He was too busy listening and raising his hand to ask intelligent questions. There was no way I could compete or impress on that level, so I tried to ingratiate myself by riffing off the lecture and mumbling little jokes and sarcastic lines: “Who wouldn’t want to be a troglodyte? I bet they have cheap rent and
dollar draft beers down there . . . must be nice to live in a mud hut. It never gets dirty! . . . The upside of bridal capture is that’s a marriage that will probably last, and parents save a shitload on a wedding.” I managed to coax one smirk out of him, which was a start, enough to say hi in the hallways.

I was casually persistent. Every time I saw Ryan sitting alone in our college lounge, “The Alley,” I’d invite myself to join him. I’m not sure he knew what to make of this smiling, slightly aggressive new girl who was constantly demanding his attention, but he never asked me to leave. We progressed to going for coffee after class. While he told me all about his life, I drifted off into a fantasy. My brain had started doing this new trick I detested but couldn’t control. I would listen to him while picturing us together in twenty years. Did other girls shamefully do this? Was it years of gender socializing, or were we hardwired to consider the nesting potential of whatever man held our current interest? There he was, likely undressing me in his head and imagining me bent over the hood of his car, while I was fantasizing about us tasting vintage wine at a Napa Valley inn. Naturally, my Ryan visions incorporated access to his wealth. First, he’d pay off my student loans. Next, I’d demand to dress only in difficult-to-even-dry-clean raw silk. He’d be some sort of academic researcher, constantly away at conferences, leaving room for me to tend our small-dog ranch and have an affair with my sculpture teacher in between conducting my own lecture series, “The Anthropology of Amour.” Sure, it sounded more like a Learning Annex course, but I was still only a sophomore—I’d have plenty of time to revise my daydream.

After the Rituals and Shamanism lecture, Ryan and I were having our coffees when he said, “You know, I’ve never done any psychedelic drugs. I really want to try mushrooms, you know? Witness that shift in reality.”

“Really? You’ve never done ’shrooms? What, was there actual shit to do in your town growing up?” I needled.

“No, well, we smoked pot,” he said, trying to save face, “but no one in high school had anything else.”

“Ha! Not that you know of!” And then an idea occurred to me. “I bet I can get us some ’shrooms,” I said.

“How?” he asked eagerly.

“I . . . might know someone. Let me work on it, okay?”

He laughed at me. “Yeah, sure. You go work on that.”

Not only had I dabbled in mushrooms numerous times and was well versed in what to expect, but I was also counting on the fact that if I helped him with his vision quest, things would progress beyond coffees.

If there was one thing I noticed about our campus, it was that the radio station was teeming with drug doers, sellers, and two-for-one deals. I walked in at lunch and very politely asked Louise, the programming assistant who was supposedly on methadone, if she knew where I could buy some mushrooms. Louise scared the shit out of me. It was clear she had no use for my big shiny face and bouncy demeanor, but she was happy to take my money. She handed me two tabs of acid and growled, “This is all I have. Ten dollars.” Apparently, I didn’t have a say in the matter, so I did as instructed and walked out with two squares of LSD in my purse. I wasn’t crazy about doing acid again.
Now that I was twenty, I wanted to take care of my body and stick to the organics. But I wasn’t about to argue this point with Louise.

I saw Ryan in The Alley reading
Das Kapital
and flopped across from him, eager to announce that I’d purchased the traditional opiate of the masses.

“So! If you’re mad keen and wanna do acid tonight, I’ve
acquired
some,” I said with a faux British accent, forgetting in that moment that I can’t do accents. “It’s pretty much like mushrooms but trippier.” I was impressed with myself, proud of how spontaneous and savvy I seemed. I was no Betty Co-Ed; I was like Demi Moore in
St. Elmo’s Fire
. And we all know how that ends. Eventually you sleep with Ashton Kutcher.